Needful Things - Stephen King [238]
Something familiar, right, and now he knew what it was. This was like the nightmares he'd had following the deaths of Annie and Todd, the nightmares in which he stood on the side of the road and watched them go past in the Scout. They were on their way to die. He knew it, but he was helpless to change it. He tried to wave his arms but they were too heavy. He tried to shout and couldn't remember how to open his mouth. They drove by him as if he were invisible, and this was like that, too-as if he had become invisible to Polly in some weird way.
"Annie-" He realized with horror whose name he had said, and backtracked. "Polly. I don't know what you're talking about, Polly, but-" "You do!" she screamed at him suddenly. "Don't say you don't when you do! Why couldn't you wait for me to tell you, Alan? And if you couldn't wait, why couldn't you ask? Why did you have to go behind my back? How could you go behind my back?"
He shut his eyes tight in an effort to catch hold of his racing, confused thoughts, but it did no good. A hideous picture came instead:
Mike Horton from the Norwayjournal-Register, bent over the newspaper's Bearcat scanner, furiously taking notes in his pidgin shorthand.
"I don't know what it is you think I've done, but you've got it wrong. Let's get together, talk-" "No. I don't think I can see you now, Alan."
"Yes. You can. And you're going to. I'll bThen Henry Payton's voice cut in. Why don't you do i't right away, before he gets nervous and decides to visit relatives in Dry HumP, South Dakota?
"You'll be what?" she was asking. "You'll be what?"
"I just remembered something," Alan said slowly.
"Oh, did you? Was it a letter you wrote at the beginning of September, Alan? A letter to San Francisco?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Polly. I can't come now because there's been a break in in the other thing. But later-"
She spoke to him through a series of gasping sobs that should have made her hard to understand but didn't. "Don't you get it, Alan? There is no later, not anymore. You-" "Polly, please-" "No! just leave me alone! Leave me alone, you snooping, prying son of a bitch!"
Bink!
And suddenly Alan was listening to that open telephone line hum again. He looked around the intersection of Main and School like a man who doesn't know where he is and has no clear understanding of how he got there. His eyes had the faraway, puzzled expression often seen in the eyes of fighters in the last few seconds before their knees come unhinged and they go sprawling to the canvas for a long winter's nap.
How had this happened? And how had it happened so quickly?
He hadn't the slightest idea. The whole town seemed to have gone slightly nuts in the last week or so and now Polly was infected, too.
Bink!
"Urn Sheriff?" It was Sheila, and Alan knew from her hushed, tentative tone that she'd had her ears on during at least part of his conversation with Polly. "Alan, are you there? Come back?"
He felt a sudden urge, amazingly strong, to rip the mike out of its socket and throw it into the bushes beyond the sidewalk. Then drive away. Anywhere. just stop thinking about everything and drive down the sun.
Instead he gathered all of his forces and made himself think of Hugh Priest. That's what he had to do, because -t now looked as if maybe Hugh had brought about the deaths of two women. Hugh was his business right now, not Polly and he discovered a great sense of relief hiding in that.
He pushed the TRANSMIT button. "Here, Sheila. Ten-four."
"Alan, I think I lost the connection with Polly. I um didn't mean to listen, but-" "That's okay, Sheila; we were done." (There was something horrible about that, but he refused to think of it now.) "Who's there with you right now? Ten-four?"
"John's catching," Sheila said,